Call me an optimistic skeptic. I am a minarchist, and I like the idea of seasteading but I have trouble with parts of it.

First, each module or rig, by nature has to be individually or collectively owned. It’s not like land where if you do nothing with the dirt for 50 years it will still be there. Taking a libertarian model, you cannot wholly own your property unless you own the whole platform, or I don’t see any other way. The platform itself is an infrastructure. It seems like the model would be more like a feudal system, where people are under the rules of whoever the platform owner is, be that very open or very restrictive.

I’m just having difficulty seeing that work.

The other aspect of that is the platform itself. That’s a lot of steel! Are there any lower cost alternatives for reliable at-sea buoyancy? Fiberglass & steel? I assume the basic platform itself is the primary barrier to entry in this concept.

It is my belief that the seastead (call it rig or module) should be collectively owned rather than individually owned, for the obvious reason that you just mentioned. Then, space can be “allocated” on the seastead for housing, commercial or public use. The best material to build a seastead is steel reinforced concrete, imho. I don’t think that the seastead itself is the primary barrier to entry. After all, it is just a slab of concrete (or steel) that money can buy. To me, the main barrier is finding that collective ready to invest in building the first small seastead.